1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to software utilities for backup of operating system hard disk drives and bare metal restore.
2. Description of Prior Art
Prior art exists that relates to making external USB attached hard disk drives bootable under various operating systems, including Windows.
Some of the art requires a person very skilled in computers, using a manual procedure(s) that may or may not work. Much of the prior art contains some element of folklore that may or may not allow an external disk to be bootable on all systems.
nedprod.com contains instructions that could help a person to construct a bootable USB drive.
911cd dotnet is a forum of experimenters who have had varying amounts of success in creating bootable USB drives.
Published patent application 20070136568 describes a methodology similar to that found on nedprod.com. 20070136568 Ding illustrates creating a bootable drive that will boot when a person skilled in the art changes the boot order of the computer system bios. 20070136568 illustrates booting an external USB drive to the point of a DOS prompt. It does not describe how a Graphical Users Interface (GUI) operating system can be executed. 20070136568 Ding will not allow the user to launch programs using a mouse point and click.